Enter any page URL and we'll fetch it, collect its links, and test every one against the live web — 404s, 410s and server errors surfaced with their real status codes. The dead links your visitors keep finding, found first.
A visitor hits a wall and often leaves. Link equity — the ranking value flowing through the link — drains into a 404 instead of a page. And the page sends a quiet "not maintained" signal to a search engine deciding how much to trust it. None of these show up in analytics as "broken link problem"; they show up as slightly worse everything.
| Code | Meaning | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| 404 Not Found | Nothing at this address. | Re-point the link to the moved/equivalent page; if it's your own URL, add a 301. |
| 410 Gone | Deliberately removed. | Same fix as a 404 — the deliberateness only matters to the target site. |
| 500 / 502 / 503 | The target server is failing. | Recheck later — persistent 5xx on an external site usually ends in a dead domain. For your own site: an incident, today. |
| 403 Forbidden | The server refuses the request. | Sometimes bot-blocking (the link may work for humans) — verify in a browser before "fixing." |
| Timeout / ✕ | No answer at all. | Often a dead domain. Check once by hand, then replace the link. |
Directly, a little; indirectly, a lot. A few 404s won't tank rankings, but every dead link wastes the link equity flowing through it, interrupts crawl paths, and tells both users and Google the page isn't maintained. On pages that exist to earn links — resources, guides — broken links quietly cap what the page can do.
Both are dead ends for the visitor. A 404 says "not found" (maybe temporarily, maybe a typo); a 410 says "gone on purpose" and gets pages dropped from the index faster. Either way, a link pointing at one needs fixing — re-point it or remove it.
A page that says "sorry, nothing here" but returns a 200 OK status. Link checkers pass it, users hit a wall anyway, and Google eventually classifies it as a soft 404 in Search Console. If a scan says a suspicious URL is "fine," open it and look.
By intent, not by deletion. Find what the link was promising the reader and point it at the best living equivalent — the moved page's new URL, an archived copy, or a better source. Deleting the link is the lazy fix that loses the context (and anchor text) it carried.
Because the web rots — the average external link has a measurable chance of dying every year as sites restructure, expire, and get acquired. Cornerstone content that cites sources should be rechecked quarterly; this tool makes a single page a 30-second job.
The free scan caps at 30 links per page to stay fast and abuse-proof. The free AI website audit crawls your whole site, and PeakKR's recurring site audits re-check every internal link on a schedule and file broken ones as assigned fix-it tasks.
Whole-site crawl instead of one page? Run the free AI website audit — it checks every internal link and writes up what it finds.
Do this on every page, without the copy-paste. The PeakKR SEO Assistant for Chrome runs these checks on whatever page you're viewing — plus broken links, Core Web Vitals, live tag inspection, and one-click tasks into your agency workspace.
Get the Chrome extension Try PeakKR free
Summit
Hi, I'm Summit — your AI guide inside PeakKR. I help agencies plan the day, draft client updates and keep every project on track. Come climb with me.
